Aether Suite 2.7.0 – Overdose Delusion

Here we are again. The ever expanding Aether Suite has expanded some more, though this release isn’t just about expansion.

There are a couple of big things about this release, and it was tough for me to actually decide which was actually of greater importance. Either way, it’s all important in the scheme of things!

Here’s your changelog:

Added the nightmare. Accessed via a small apartment through one of the doors in the Red Robin Plaza.

Overhauled the main area of Arclite Community College, and partially overhauled the club building. Roughly 75% of the main area has been rebuilt from the ground up, using a newly made tileset.

Some small tweaks have been made in a few places in Knox.

Now I know, that doesn’t look like much. It’s only a list of 3 things. However, the nightmare is a linear series of cells, which I actually recommend you PLAY start to end before you think about using them to take any kind of pictures. It’s the only part of the Aether Suite so far with any kind of a linear drive to it. It’s about a 30 minute experience. Could be 20 if you’re lucky and also miss out on some stuff. Could be an hour, if you’re very unlucky. It’s very much inspired by some of my favourite horror game experiences. I don’t want to say too much about it, because I think too much foreknowledge might ruin the experience. What I will say though is don’t miss the torch. Some of you might have light spells or vanilla torches sitting around, but that torch is the best way to play it, preferably in first person, because third person seems to refuse to use torch anims, no matter what kind of crazy things I do to work around it.

The school, on the other hand, if I’ve done my job right, no one should even think anything has changed, except for a subtle improvement in overall quality. I made a completely new tileset for the shell of the college. New walls. The old walls and the college in general was built when I was just starting to get to know the CK and its quirks. As a result it was plagued with little holes in the walls, floors, and ceilings, and some not very well made tiles, or tiles that didn’t even fit properly into the grid, such as the stairwells, which were bloody awful. The point of my overhaul was not to alter the school, but just to fix all of its inherent problems. I made completely new stairwells which are MUCH nicer. I optimised a lot of the way the building is designed. The new tiles all fit nicely into a 64 unit grid and slot together like lego, so there should be no tiny gaps in the walls, or under the windows, or next to the doors. All in all, it should just FEEL better to be in.

Anyway, enough with my rambling.

Here’s the warning that the AS now comes with: THIS MOD CONTAINS IMAGES AND SITUATIONS WHICH SOME PLAYERS MAY FIND DISTURBING. IF YOU ARE EASILY UPSET OR HAVE SEVERE FORMS OF ANY COMMON PSYCHOLOGICAL TRIGGERS, PLEASE BEWARE OF THE NIGHTMARE PORTION OF THIS MOD.

This warning is not a joke. I had to apologise to one of my testers because they had quite a severe reaction and couldn’t actually finish testing the mod. It goes as much for this mod as it does for any psychological horror game.

P.S. A MASSIVE thank you to donators! The original donation request didn’t actually get much attention, so when I made my second one, I didn’t really keep track of its progress, but the response was massive! Not only did I get enough to cover the few summer months I was originally aiming for, there’s enough money in the server pot now to cover the next TEN months. The donation button will remain, but now anyone donating is basically just buying me ice cream (or games? Or a newer, less cruddy GPU?), so seriously, unless you really specifically want to donate, there’s no need.

42 Comments

Since there’s no specific end goal, version numbers represent the amount of work that’s gone into an update. As the long and wordy release post point out, though the actual changelog is only 3 items long, the school rebuild and the nightmare took a lot of work. The nightmare in particular is quite a large addition. If you’re interested in my personal feelings on the number breakdown, 2.5.2 > 2.5.3 was a little bedroom, 2.5.3 > 2.6.3 was the nightmare and all of the cells and new things it adds, 2.6.3 > 2.7.0 was all the work that went into rebuilding the college.

Like I said though, they’re just arbitrary numbers I slap on relative to the amount of work an update took.

Man, you’re too good to be true
Downloading your Aether.
Question .. do you already have an area for users to post a screener?
Hell, every few days i can’t hold back to step into your Aether to make some shootings
Thanx for all your work, bro. We appreciate it.
Greetz
Freddo

I don’t even play horror games, but that was scary as eff. Especially the ?s. Wrong turn, a empty basket, and mauled. I mostly lurk on your blog but I just wanted to pop in and say good job on that. Keep making cool things. ;P

My only real feedback is the, uh, “You Just Don’t Understand” room. I walked around for like 30mins looking for the exit, which I was only able to find once I figured out what the room actually WAS. Not sure if that was intentional, but you *might* want to shrink that room a bit.

Strange that it didn’t work with MO. I’ll have to bear that in mind for future reference.

Commenter
June 14, 2015 3:19 am

I guess it’s a pretty isolated incident, but also with installing Aether with MO, upon using the console to teleport to the lobby in place of the spell, I was met with nothingness and falling into the void.

Hello and thank you very much for the update. I have a question regarding the nightmare part: are troll aberrations supposed to be immortal? I cannot kill a single one of them (tried console too) and so I’m kinda stuck in the basket room. Or maybe I’m just stupid trying to play this on level 1 char?

I really like this mod, the nightmare portion almost made my heart stop at some points lolol
Are you continuing to work on this mod because if you are that would be awesome! You have so much talent with this kind of stuff it is really amazing. Anyway, this mod is amazing and i appreciate you. Keep up the great work.

is could be me but I really didn’t like the nightmare part of this. it just felt like a total waste of time. To me AS is about taking good screenshots – so this nightmare part just felt really out of place.

Any chance you could do a type of studio set up for screenshots? IE like static cars or bike or something? or just flat screen back-drop backgrounds?

If it felt like a waste of time, then it was not made for you. You are not required to use any part of the AS. If you don’t like it, don’t go there. A lot of people enjoyed it, and those are the people I made it for. It’s just an experimental thing that was too small for its own mod. That’s why it’s so out of the way that people might not even notice it’s there.

Thank you so much for AS. It is so fun to use and a great place to use all those modern mods. I was wondering about the nightmare part. Is the burning room the end? I could not see anywhere to go there.

Might be some other mod you’re using that alters torches somehow. The torch works fine. Maybe your ENB has “fix shadow casters” active. That might break it, since that setting breaks a lot of shadow casters instead of “fixing” them.

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Donations are not payment for modding. They normally go towards helping me keep my server running, or other miscellaneous monetary concerns stated at the time, if requested, and I will continue modding with or without them. Donations with modding demands attached will be returned.